This book focuses on the story of M Gessen's relatives surviving the Holocaust and the Soviet regime. And I was struck by how miraculous her family's story seems. I've felt the same way about the stories I read and heard from others. I've had the same said to me. and I think the reason for that is... surviving from 1917 to 1946 truly was a miracle. I looked this up: Belarus's population in 1914 was 8,961,800. it is barely greater than that today. After the Civil War and holodomor it drops as low as 5M in 1926. It barely recovers through 1937, only to be destroyed during the war. So 4M people are lost between 1914 and 1926, and then at least another 2.5M are lost during the war, nearly a million of them Jews. So out of a population of 10M, if your Jewish grandparents who grew in Belarus survived the war, they were among just 100K people who did (if my back of envelope math is correct). No wonder we're all cousins, and our grandparents' biographies feel made up.